ARTICLES ABOUT

How Do You Say ‘ASAP’ In Other Languages?

What if you’re in another country and you want to tell someone to hurry the hell up already? First of all, you should ideally be prepared for any potential blowback to your snappiness. And second of all, you might want to check to see if ASAP stands for something in the local language. In many cases, other languages will adopt Anglicisms as loan words, which means you can probably get away with using this time-honored acronym in many other countries around the world.

In case you honestly didn’t know, ASAP stands for “as soon as possible.” It originated as U.S. Army slang in 1955, but today, we use it to imbue the most mundane requests with a military-style urgency. There are other languages around the world that recognize this acronym in the same form or have a different way to express the same concept.

Here are a couple of languages that recognize “ASAP” as a kindred term, just like in English, for requesting speedy turnover:

Italian (pronounced asap-pa)

Spanish (can be written A.S.A.P., a.s.a.p. or even ah.sah.p)

French (pronounced ah-zap)

Japanese

And when “ASAP” won’t cut it, here is how you would say “as soon as possible” (or whatever the closest equivalent of ASAP stands for) in a few different languages — including those ones listed above.

Steph is a writer, lindy hopper, and astrologer. She’s also a language enthusiast who grew up bilingual and had an early love affair with books. She has mostly proved herself as a New Yorker, and she can introduce herself in Swedish thanks to Babbel. She also speaks Russian and Spanish, but she’s a little rusty on those fronts.

Steph is a writer, lindy hopper, and astrologer. She’s also a language enthusiast who grew up bilingual and had an early love affair with books. She has mostly proved herself as a New Yorker, and she can introduce herself in Swedish thanks to Babbel. She also speaks Russian and Spanish, but she’s a little rusty on those fronts.